


So Little, Too Much

by littletechiebird



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Red Robin (Comics), Robin (Comics), Superboy (Comics), Teen Titans, Teen Titans (Comics), Young Justice, Young Justice (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 17:13:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littletechiebird/pseuds/littletechiebird





	So Little, Too Much

As soon as he realizes, there’s no going back. All he can do is panic and wonder why, how... Why did it take him this long to realize? How could it not have dawned on him sooner?

So he tortures himself. He thinks back.

Back to the days that he swore he was going to snatch the birdboy up by his cape and shake him until he would be off of that high horse of his and realize he needed to _stop giving him orders_. When he had decided that the reason he was always hiding behind that stupid mask of his was because he had the worse case of acne that had ever been possible. It would have completed the whole scrawny nerd by look.

That was nowhere near the case. Rob had to go and have those bright blue eyes with flawless skin. Eventually, he’d found that the only marks that marred the other boy’s skin were from scars that had resulted from old wounds that came with the job. Some had him baffled as to how Tim had survived.

Those were the kinds of things that Kon had started to learn about him as they graduated their Young Justice days and entered into the world of the Teen Titans. They trusted each other more than ever. They changed and had grown a bit. Tim... lost his father. Kon learned more about who he was, or where he had come from. He put his friends through hell. He hurt Tim.

He stepped away.

Then... he died.

Out of everything he had seen Tim survive, he’d never understood how he stayed standing. He lost him, Stephanie, and Bruce. Then he lost another part of himself when he lost Robin. He hadn’t been there to see it -- his loss, his devastation, his moments that were full of panic and hysteria. He hadn’t been there. He’d been trying, fighting, begging to get back to everyone and everything he left, and to Tim.

Then, once he was back, to hear what he tried to do...

He still remembered the look on Tim’s face when he’d asked about it. Kon had wanted to hear it straight from him, hearsay wasn’t quite good enough. But he had seemed so nervous, so guilty, possibly ashamed. But when he had first asked, he had seen a glimpse of the desperation that others had spoken of to drive Tim so far as to try and clone him.

Desperation was also what helped bring them together. There were just a few words that went unsaid when Tim clung to him so tightly the first time he had seen him again since... he had been gone. Even if it hadn’t quite been the right time, they caught up, Tim filled him in, and shortly after...

They were just tired of wasted time and opportunities. He knew Tim was tired of loss overall. 

In all honesty, Kon wasn’t sure how much more Tim could take. He wished he could protect him from everything. It was an unrealistic desire but that wouldn’t keep him from trying. 

From that moment on, shortly after he had proven a point to flip the bird to Ra’s, that had been both his motivation and his goal. He had seen Tim’s frustration with him, and the idea in general. He was probably right to have felt that way. Kon had started off a bit strong. He had allowed his fear to go a little too far and he’d tried to hold tim back a bit too much. He had gotten in the way a time or two. Or ten.

His wake up call had been watching Tim fall to the ground and just bleeding... All because he had been telling him over the comm to wait, to back down, and thus starting an argument about the matter. It was just... Tim’s fragility was too much sometimes.

But having the comm line go dead, arriving on the scene to see his best friend, his lover, resting in a puddle of his own blood, had been a cold slap of reality. So he knew, that wasn’t the way he could protect Tim. That was how he’d get him killed and lose him that much faster.

There.

_There_ , that was just it.

That was the moment that he realized no matter how safe he managed to keep Tim, no matter if he kept him from the superhero thing, one day...

He was going to lose him.

The realization didn’t dawn on him. It was nowhere near that kind of grace. It was heavy, it was mean, it was staggering and crippling. It almost felt as if he had been force-fed Kryptonite. He’d never felt so weak before. He’d never felt so lost, so desperate.

...Was this how Tim had felt?

Or was it just a taste?

The thought threatened to drown him as he sat beside Tim in the medical bay of the batcave as Alfred tended to him. He’d been lucky to be allowed inside the lair of the Bat. He supposed Batman had been feeling generous. Or no one had told, nor asked him. He was grateful either way. 

Tim was fragile. Tim was human. They had a time limit. Only, _they_ didn’t. Tim did. He didn’t. 

He didn’t because he was only half human and the Kryptonian in him would be the reason for his invincibility and hat kept him alive. Then, simply (there was nothing simple about it) being a clone and all the jacked up complications from that, and the rest of being half of one thing and another, would be the reason he was panicking for the rest of his --

...for the rest of _Tim_ ’s life.

Right then, imagining watching him age, that wasn’t what he had a problem with. He didn’t mind if Tim aged because he knew... He would always be his Tim, his Robin. And if watching up grow up from that boney, cute, scrawny kid int the handsome, strong, impossible man with the most attractive hair ever was any sign at all of how he would continue to grow and change, then it told Kon that Tim was going to become unreasonable and unfair rather quickly. Not that he wasn’t already. But that just made Kon that lucky. It wasn’t as if he had not already known.

It was because he knew he was lucky that he panicked. It was also because he was incredibly selfish. TIm had lost him, and yet he had found a way to survive. Just barely, but he had managed it. Conner knew he couldn’t do the same. 

Tim would have no way, no chance of coming back.

He couldn’t do this without him -- couldn’t survive -- didn’t want to. He didn’t want to hear that TIm would want him to. He didn’t want to be sitting at his bedside in his old age, holding a cool, soft, wrinkled hand that had a fading warmth and pulse. He didn’t want to exchange goodbyes that only he would be left with. He didn’t want to hear, “You’ll be okay, even without me.” Didn’t want the last, “I love you”s that would echo in his ears for the rest of his days. Because the echoes would fade just as surely as his heart would die with Tim.

Just because he was the meta-human of their pair did not make him stronger with everything. That was a lesson he had learned from Tim because with all that he had survived, Kon knew he would have never been able to do the same. That was why he knew he wouldn’t survive the loss of his ally, his best friend, his lover, and the true completion of himself.

If he had to hold his hand, say that last “I love you” and tell him goodbye, he knew he would break any promise he had made to Tim, or anyone else, that he would keep living. By then, he would have lived enough. He would want to believe that when Tim made him promise not to follow him -- because he would -- not until there was a natural time to do so somehow, that he was, in fact, begging him to follow. After all, what would be more natural than following your partner in life, in death?

And he also knew that because Tim knew him so well, that he would have removed all of the Kryptonite he had hidden away at his place. He would give it to Batman, to Damian, because surely that little shit would have taken on the mantle.

It was because he knew that as well, that he would go to Damian and relinquish all of his pride and beg. He would beg for him to give him the Kryptonite and just do this one thing for him because it was all he had ever asked, and all he would ever ask of him since he just couldn’t do this, wouldn’t do this without Tim. He didn’t care which it was anymore because it didn’t matter. Nothing did. He’d had to hold his lover’s hand and watch him die. For the last several decades he had watch him live, and he had lived life with him. But he had also watched him die the whole time. And he had known that. 

Kon had been desperate to find a way to keep him alive, to make him a little less mortal too -- something, anything! But there was nothing. There was just the lazarus pit and he couldn’t -- he just couldn’t do that to Tim because he remembered him saying how scared he had been the one time he believed that he had been thrown into the pit by Ra’s and his goons. 

He wouldn’t have been able to do that to him, no matter how selfish he was.

So he hadn’t been able to save him.

So he’d had to watch him slip from his grasp.

So this was the only answer..!

And Damian just needed to say yes and allow him the one thing or Kon would just find a way to take it. 

But then Damian took pity on him, and Kon had never been so gracious for pity in his life. He followed to the vault, and he waited, and even as it opened and the Kryptonite radiated freely, he felt nothing but peace. Even as he crumpled to the ground and summoned everything he had to crawl that last inch into the vault and the door shut, just to make it quick, he only felt peace. It was all for the sake of being with --

“Kon..?”

His head snapped up to the weakened yet worried voice that spoke his name so wearily. 

“I’m here, Tim.”

Looking down at the young man that rested on the bed of the medical bay within the cave, he knew that for that moment, they were fine.

But the truth was that they had so little time, and that was almost too much to bear.


End file.
